On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the fluctuating price of corn, how farm bill subsidies impact your grocery bill and why you’re getting screwed when you buy a bag of coffee.

Which John Hickenlooper so totally did. Executive summary: Gov. Hickenlooper bragged in his State of the State address that Colorado had gone from 40th in the nation in job creation to 4th. Which is impressive, yes? – Except that Colorado went from 40th in 2010 to 4th in 2012. Also in 2012 was an election where the Colorado state legislature went fully under Democratic control… | Read More »

[*"... in order to get the candidate out of the Kentucky Senate race." As noted elsewhere, the title was a little clumsy.] Like Jim Geraghty, I don’t expect that this story will go anywhere – Democratic primary in a Democrat-controlled state with a Democrat in the White House to quash an investigation on the federal level and a former Democratic Senate candidate as Attorney General | Read More »

More often than not, I am a pretty relaxed and laid back person. I don’t really dwell on issues, I rarely hold a grudge, and things that probably should get me worked up just don’t. But lately I’ve been fixated on and can’t stop dwelling on an issue that seems to keep cropping up. Most recently it cropped up with the Duck Dynasty issue. There | Read More »

This Washington Post article starts bad for the O’Malley administration… More than a year before Maryland launched its health insurance exchange, senior state officials failed to heed warnings that no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan for how it would be ready by Oct. 1. Over the following months, as political leaders continued to | Read More »

(H/T: @allahpundit) Yeah, about the Spanish-language Obamacare site… Mirroring problems with the federal health care website, people around the nation attempting to navigate the Spanish version have discovered their own set of difficulties. The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late. A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form. And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes | Read More »

I’m going to show my readers this paragraph, than walk them through it. Background: it’s part of Robert Gates’ memoir on his time as SecDef. Specifically, Gates (with the help of the military brass) was trying to keep Afghanistan from sliding off of the beam under the new administration, and running headlong into the Obama administration’s apparent inherent inability to understand that wars are messy | Read More »

Here we go again. The last couple of times, they wanted to use “statistical sampling” to replace the Constitutionally-mandated direct enumeration in the Census. Now they want to use online polls to do the Census.

Let’s be clear: The Obama FCC is terrible, and generally threatens innovation, but I absolutely oppose efforts to do a comprehensive Communications Act bill. It’s nothing against Fred Upton and Greg Walden on this, as they’ve generally been pretty good on these matters. But any huge bill like this is going to get set up by every lobbyist in DC, and it will invariably grow a grab bag of special interest giveaways. A comprehensive Communications Act would become a ‘we have to pass it to find out what’s in it’ moment. Don’t do it. Pass one reform at a time. Find incremental reforms.

Over the last day or so there has been a fair amount of debate about whether or not Mark Levin should have disclosed a fairly consistently large purchase history by the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) of his book before he endorsed the organization. The ire is mostly directed at National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Brad Dayspring, Communications Director, for tweeting this Thursday: Fishy: Senate Conservatives | Read More »

The December 2013 jobs report was about like the December 2013 weather. It was cloudy with a chance of Expletive. Depending on whose estimate you trust more, the models missed reality by 113 to 151 thousand. I’ll credit the BLS with not hiding the decline and admitting this one was a stinker. Contrary to expert opinion, I think it would have been a stinker regardless of what fell out of the sky. If the current set of conditions indicates recovery, God preserve me from an economic relapse. I’ll detail my reasoning below.

Ach, the tangled skeins of modern journalism/politics/NGOs. Let me walk you through the timeline. First, it just recently came out that Senator Mark Udall’s office tried to strong-arm Colorado’s Division of Insurance back in November into retracting the perfectly-accurate statement that Obamacare caused about 250,000 people to get insurance cancellation notices. Oddly enough, on 01/09/2014 the Denver Post came up with an article written by | Read More »

A few days ago, I was chatting with a friend of liberal persuasion about the cult-classic TV series “Firefly” – which, particularly in its concluding theatrical film, is one of pop culture’s strongest parables about libertarianism and rebellion against authority. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it was a science-fiction program about a space-faring band of lovable rogues, some of whom fought in a losing | Read More »

Perhaps I am more ambivalent than I should be about the legalization of marijuana. I lean toward letting the law remain as it is, but my hostility toward the nanny state pulls me in the direction of individual responsibility and letting the chips fall where they may. Therein lies my concern, though. Letting the chips fall where they may could lead society to pick up | Read More »

The days may be numbered for one of the last major trucking companies in the old Teamsters’ National Master Freight Agreement.

As YRC Worldwide has struggled to survive for years under the weight of its Teamster associated costs (particularly the Teamsters’ underfunded pension plan), the company did get some relief from the union several years ago as the Teamsters to agreed to take temporary cuts.

However, the Teamster concessions needed to continue and, with 32,000 jobs at stake, the company had asked (begged, really) the Teamster members to extend a concessionary contract for several more years.

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the December 2013 jobs report, the Fed’s possible reaction and how temps are hurting manufacturing employment.